The Rent In The Fabric Chapter 1
Dec. 28th, 2010 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galadriel1010Title: The Rent In The Fabric
Chapter Title: Chapter 1
Challenge/Fest: Journey Story Big Bang
Rating: T
Dedication: Beta-d by my brother. Any mistakes remaining are his fault.
Summary: Jack Harkness leaves Earth behind to shake off the pain of losing everything, and to keep his promise to Ianto. Along the way, hope kindles, and he sets out on a search for the other end of the Rift and the hope of a reunion. There are aliens, space stations, a university, and a familiar face on his path.
Characters: Jack Harkness, OCs and a surprise familiar face.
Contains: Angst, world invention, liberal use of a business management degree.
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
UNIT got him to the House of the Dead, and UNIT got him out again. Despite their often-tense interactions over the years, they had taken Jack under their care in the aftermath of the disaster with the 456, paying their penance for not acting fast enough, for letting the government move and destroy Torchwood on their watch. He’d been a quiet assistant in the early days, content to hand over power and responsibility for protecting the city he could no longer care about. It all came crashing down when they got down to his bunker, though, and found it intact - Torchwood paranoia had demanded a nuclear-safe bunker, and then Jack had moved into it. They returned from the site one day with a crate filled with his personal possessions, and the few items of Ianto’s that had been tucked in there with his own had sent him running.
Five months later he returned, dragging himself from one day to the next and chasing a rumour. They helped him to build his plan, gave him hope, and took him there. When it failed, and one foot in front of the other was too much to bear, they brought him back and tried to put him back together. It hadn’t worked. Jack Harkness was broken, and nothing on Earth could fix him. He begged them to help him return to the stars, and apparently even UNIT weren’t completely heartless. They contacted the first ship that requested passage through their airspace and arranged for Jack to travel with them. All he needed was his wrist-strap - currently in the possession of Gwen Cooper - to provide the teleportation device to get him onto their ship.
X~X~X~X
A biting wind knifed through him, and he drew his coat tighter around himself to guard against it. It seemed to hang wrong these days, too heavy on his shoulders and too loose around him, ready to whip away at any moment. It was no longer the protection and comfort it had once been.
Voices approached him up the hill, and he raised his chin with difficulty to face them. Gwen and Rhys crested the brow of the hill side by side, chuntering about the difficulties that Gwen faced getting up there. It stung, seeing them worrying about such tiny things when he’d lost everything, but he couldn’t tell them what had happened. Gwen would blame him or pity him, and he couldn’t cope with either.
He gained a sort of vindictive pleasure out of not telling her in the end. It was hard to understand what he’d seen in her when she stood there, demanding that he stay for her, thinking that she could be enough and that he owed her something. He’d indulged her too much, and she’d gone on being the spoilt only child she’d always been - in his grief, her self-centred demands suffocated him and blinded him to anything but his pain and her happiness.
Everything he had loved was gone. Alice would never speak to him again, he would never get a chance to get to know Steven, Ianto had done what Jack never could and chosen the world over Jack. In the face of his losses, especially the recent reopening of the void that Ianto had left in his heart, it was too hard not to hate Gwen for surviving with her family intact. Every movement ached, raising his head was a challenge, and he could only force himself to get up in the morning by not going to bed at all. If he stayed on Earth he would destroy himself. So when Gwen told him that he couldn’t run... He pressed the button on his wrist-strap and smiled grimly. “Oh yes I can. Just watch me.”
X~X~X~X
The teleport disoriented him, and he staggered against the wall whilst the world righted itself again. A high frequency vibration ran through the metal against his side, rattling his teeth and adding to the pounding of his headache. He shook his head and pushed himself up off the wall as footsteps approached, drawing himself up and turning to face them. “Captain Acisai?”
“Captain Harkness.” The leader of the group held a slender finely-boned hand out to him, and her brow ridges flushed pink with concern. “You are hurt?”
“No, it was just the teleport,” he assured her, shaking her hand and letting her assess him even as he reassessed his own initial judgement. “You must be Sergeant Fimer.”
“Yes. The Captain is on the bridge still. I bring you to him.” She stepped back and gestured to her guards. “You have weapons?”
His hand went automatically to his side, but he dropped it and shook his head. “No. I lost it,” he explained. “Will I need to have?”
“No. We will search your bag. Procedure,” she added with an unapologetic shrug. “Please give to Shipman Hikt.”
Jack handed his bag over and tucked his hands back into the pockets of his heavy coat, watching her overseeing the search of his bag. The search revealed very little - an airtight box filled with coffee that they sniffed cautiously, a couple of books and a few mementoes he couldn’t part with, and a variety of long-life foods in case he ended up in regions where the local cuisine would kill him. It might not stop him for long, but the darkness had grown more dark, cold and empty than ever before, and it was harder to force himself out of it.
The sergeant studied the pocket-watch, turning it over in one hand. “What this? Dangerous?”
“No! No,” he assured her, taking it back from her and running his thumb over the face. He hesitated, searching for the terms she would understand best. Her race, the Vaasthi, had many complicated levels of relationships, and it was hard enough to explain what Ianto had been to him in human terms. “It belonged to my living-lover,” he said eventually, settling for the word for a partner you lived with but were not in a formal relationship with. “He died.”
“I sorry.” She dropped her hand away from it and stepped back. “Your bag safe. We go to bridge when you ready.”
He nodded at her and repacked the bag as neatly as he could, then hauled it onto his shoulder and followed her down the hall, aware of her guards behind him. The corridors were tiled with large, pale-blue rubber-like tiles that absorbed the noise and vibration from the engines, unless you were leaning against them. It was a strange feeling underfoot, like walking where someone had spilled a sticky drink and not mopped it up. Transparent doors led into other corridors and into the engine rooms, where the volume increased, and then they passed a row of sealed, opaque doors with plaques that indicated the names, ranks and duty hours of their occupants. Sergeant Fimer paused by one of the doors and indicated it. “My cabin.”
He nodded, and she continued further down the corridor to a larger pair of clear doors. Through the doors he could see the bridge and the quiet bustle of well-organised activity. The bridge was a gently curved room with a panoramic vid screen. The working area was triangular, cutting off two of the corners of the room with two banks of the navigation, communication and support systems that were essential for a vessel of this size, and in the centre of the room was a wide chart-table, on which the captain and his navigator were checking their route.
The doors slid open with a cheerful tone, and the crew on the bridge looked up at them until a glare from Sergeant Fimer sent them back to looking busy. She bowed to the captain and led Jack up to him. “Captain Acisai, this Captain Harkness. Captain Harkness, Captain Acisai of the Atiftio Corporation.”
“Welcome aboard the Transporter Gulio,” Acisai greeted him in carefully-pronounced English. “You are a UNIT man, yes?”
“Torchwood,” he corrected in their language, noting the strength in the long, fine fingers when Acisai shook his hand. “Their allies.”
“Ah, Torchwood, yes. And you are Captain of Torchwood, yes?”
“I was.” He released the captain’s hand and hooked his thumb under the strap of his bag instead, stepping back to a respectful distance. “I want to thank you for agreeing to carry me. I am to join your crew?”
“Yes yes. You have engineering? We sort that later. You tired, and tonight you our guest.” He gestured to the sergeant, who returned a salute, and turned back to his chart. “Sergeant Fimer show you your quarters, show you mess. Tomorrow, if ready, you work, yes.”
Jack bowed, as he’d seen Sergeant Fimer do, and followed her back off the bridge onto the corridor. She led him back down to one of the offshoot corridors they’d passed and down it, stopping outside one of two doors off it. “This bunk room,” she explained, swiping a card in the lock and holding it out to him. Inside the room, which was a narrow corridor with a wall of pods leading off it, she showed him to one of the empty pods and demonstrated how to open the lockers iside it. “Your bunk. Stow your bag, and I show you mess.”
He stashed it in the locker and locked it again, unwilling to leave it out or to keep the sergeant waiting, and followed her back down the corridor. It was a simple layout and easy to follow. The mess was on the same side of the ship as his bunk room, but they had to return to the main corridor and continue away from the bridge for a while before they reached it. There was a small crowd gathered around one of the tables, playing a game with long, narrow sticks in different colours that Jack recognised from his travelling days, and they all saluted with an easy familarity at their entrance, turning curious gazes on Jack. He greeted them with a nod, aware of how different to them he was. “Captain Harkness,” Sergeant Fimer introduced him. “The UNIT man.”
They nodded and beckoned him over. “Captain, maybe you will be captain one day,” one of them suggested with a grin. “Captain Captain Harkness.”
Jack blinked and laughed. “Maybe,” he agreed. “One day.”
“We engineering team,” the leader explained. “Down time for shift, not yet time for sleep. So we play - you play?”
“I play,” he agreed. “But soon I have to sleep. Long day. Long year,” he corrected.
“Sleep,” a young woman in casual clothes scoffed. “Life not for sleep.”
He smiled at her and let them bring him into the game. They only had another quarter turn - about ten minutes in Earth time - before the shift had to go back to work and those who were off shift turned in for the rest of their rotation. Jack followed them back to the bunk room and got into his bunk silently, sealing it behind him and stretching out in the confined space to get as much rest as he could before his new life came knocking.
X~X~X~X
The Vaasthi’s food was safe, if unappetising, so he joined the crew in the mess the next morning to see what they’d set him to doing. They were all dull-eyed from sleep and quieter than they had been the night before, and quite content him to leave him to stare into his mug of chak. A short, slender member of the engineering team got up eventually, tapped him on th shoulder and beckoned him out of the room. The previous shift were acting as the mess crew, and they left their plates on the side by the door for them to clear up.
Jack’s guide took him down through the access ducts to the cargo hold below. Strong bullwarks separated the smaller compartments and protected the cargo from damaging the ship or being damaged. In one of the empty holds was a large piece of machinery that Jack recognised vaguely as being part of the cooling system, although he’d never worked closely enough with a ship of this size to know exactly what it was. “So,” he started, aware that his guide still hadn’t said a word. “What do you need me to do?”
The engineer gave him a withering look over the top of the machine, kneeling down beside it and pulling his kit over. “Just maintenence and cleaning. We rotate them, reduce wear, prolong use. Cheaper than working and working and working.” He bent his head to his task and grunted. “That for people.”
He nodded at the engineer’s back and rolled his shirt sleeves up, then came to join him next to the machine. Whilst his new colleague removed and checked the screws for wear, Jack accepted something like a pen with a tiny sponge on the end and cleaned traces of oil and grit from the holes the screws had been taken from. They worked smoothly, minds lost in the numbing but delicate task until the young woman he’d seen the night before came to join them with mugs of chak. She bent over them curiously and peered into the works. “Need new rotors,” she said, as if they hadn’t noticed. “We tell sergeant for next stop.”
Jack frowned up at her and sat back on his haunches. “Why not the captain?”
She shrugged. “Sergeant easier. You drink?”
He accepted the mug from her at last and nodded. “Thank you. Where will you get a replacement rotor?”
“Easy on Yooducca Station. All the parts from all the scrap. The scavenger ships come in... big losses in this part of space. Big losses. Only habitable planet is Sol 3, and little help from there.” She twitched her ears. “You know.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re pretty under-developed.” He swallowed a mouthful of Chak and grimaced. “But we have better tasting food.”
She laughed and patted his head. “Best chak in the universe. You have no taste. Come to mess later? We drink chak, play, tell stories. You have stories to tell us?”
“Lots.” He smiled and raised his mug to her. “Maybe I will.”
“Good. See you there.” She left them to it without a backwards glance and Jack finished off his mug of chak - which was warm even if it tasted foul - before he turned his attention back to the work.
“She distracted,” his colleague muttered. “Not good for delicate work.”
“Is that why she’s an errand runner?”
“Yes. Still young.” He reached inside to put a new screw in the hole Jack had just cleaned, dropping the other into a tin with a handful of others he’d deemed damaged. “Too young for ship.”
Jack grunted and started on the next hole. “Who is she related to?”
His colleague grinned down at his work. “Department commander. He intend her first captain. He want son.”
“Ah. Do you think she’ll do it?”
“No. If Sergeant Fimer not make captain, no woman make captain. And Sergeant Fimer no make captain.” He put the last screw back in that section and wiped his hands off. “You see.”
Jack accepted the rag to wipe his hands and frowned. “Why won’t she make captain?”
“She too good. First woman to captain should not better her former captains. But new captain should always better former captains.” His ears flattened against his skull. “She leave fleet soon. No advancement here. I follow her.”
“Yeah? Good for you.” He tilted his head and smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Engineer Poffi. And you are Engineer Captain now.”
Jack opened his mouth to correct him and... didn’t. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
X~X~X~X
Jack and Poffi were grimy by the time they got back to the mess, but still buzzing with energy from the Chak. The maintenence work was fiddly, but the only time they got to move around was when they’d swapped the piece they’d repaired for the back-up and put that back into storage. Everything else had been stationary, working on small sections of the engine. There was always a lot of nothing-to-do between stations, which allowed for longer down-time and careful maintenance.
Most of the crew were in the mess, eating large bowls of a simple stew with slabs of salty bread that Jack eschewed. The stew was bitter to his tastes, but there was something definitely wrong about the bread in his recollections.
They ate in silence, chewing their way through the bread and the tough meat. When most of them had nearly finished, the chef fame around with a tray of hot drinks and lumps of heavily-fruited cake. It was all distractingly blue, but it was sweet and refreshing after the bitterness of the stew.
The sergeant and the captain entered, and everyone got to their feet until they had their food and were sitting down at a separate table in the corner. Jack got to his feet with the rest of the crew, raising his eyebrows at Poffi in question. He twitched his ears in response, and they waited until the officers were engaged in eating before they leaned closer. “The captain demands respect,” Poffi explained. “He hope that that get it.”
“Ah.” Jack nodded and nibbled at his cake. Down the table people were starting to finish, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman stood up. She glanced over at the captain’s table and waited for him to gesture her on before she started tapping two spoons together against her hand to set the rhythm. Other people took it up, and when she was satisfied she began singing.
It was a rousing, carousing song about a period in a dock and the trouble that could befall a naiive young shipman there. Every culture had them, and they all ran along similar lines. The shipman drank too much, ran into the wrong sort of girl and woke up the next morning with all his shore-money and most of his clothes missing. The crew obviously knew it well, and with enough of them joining in their voices were less grating and more musical to Jack’s ears.
The chef brought a large bottle out from the kitchen and set it down in front of the singer. She took a deep swig and looked around the table, then passed it on to the young errand girl, who took a smaller swig and got to her feet, resting one foot on her chair and striking a pose before launching into a ghost story set on a darkened ship. The process went on, with each person choosing someone else to tell the next story, until someone close to him set the bottle down in front of Jack. “You tell,” he called across, his bridge crew uniform explaining why Jack didn’t recognise him. “You tell story of Sol.”
He started to protest, but a face came to his mind and he nodded. “Okay. I tell you a story, a true story.” There was a chorus of the good-natured jeers that greeted any claim that the story about to be told was a true story and he shook his head. “True story. I was there.
“There was a show, a travelling show. They came to the villages and they stole people away. For many years they took people, no one knew and no one believed.” He found himself settling into their speech patterns, the spacer’s dialect. “When the travelling shows stopped they went, took their stolen people with them. But nothing remembered gone for ever. The show was recorded and they returned, passing from legend to truth. Like ghosts. They touched a young man, but could not steal him away. They stole others. Old union-lovers, a young woman... a family, with two young children. The young man they couldn’t steal, he vowed to find them and return their victims. He searched, found them. Trapped them between light and dark. But their vitims were gone, all but one. The man they couldn’t steal, he found the youngest one, the child, and carried him home, out of the darkness.” He looked around at them, at their expectant faces. “He protected the child,” he continued, “guarded him, and hid him away in a safe place. The shadows couldn’t take him, and they could not take the child back.”
It wasn’t the best story he’d ever told, nor was it the smoothest, but he could already tell that it would be one they remembered. He passed the bottle on and sat down, feeling a sense of calm purpose stealing over him. Ianto Jones would not be forgotten.
Next chapter
Chapter Title: Chapter 1
Challenge/Fest: Journey Story Big Bang
Rating: T
Dedication: Beta-d by my brother. Any mistakes remaining are his fault.
Summary: Jack Harkness leaves Earth behind to shake off the pain of losing everything, and to keep his promise to Ianto. Along the way, hope kindles, and he sets out on a search for the other end of the Rift and the hope of a reunion. There are aliens, space stations, a university, and a familiar face on his path.
Characters: Jack Harkness, OCs and a surprise familiar face.
Contains: Angst, world invention, liberal use of a business management degree.
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
UNIT got him to the House of the Dead, and UNIT got him out again. Despite their often-tense interactions over the years, they had taken Jack under their care in the aftermath of the disaster with the 456, paying their penance for not acting fast enough, for letting the government move and destroy Torchwood on their watch. He’d been a quiet assistant in the early days, content to hand over power and responsibility for protecting the city he could no longer care about. It all came crashing down when they got down to his bunker, though, and found it intact - Torchwood paranoia had demanded a nuclear-safe bunker, and then Jack had moved into it. They returned from the site one day with a crate filled with his personal possessions, and the few items of Ianto’s that had been tucked in there with his own had sent him running.
Five months later he returned, dragging himself from one day to the next and chasing a rumour. They helped him to build his plan, gave him hope, and took him there. When it failed, and one foot in front of the other was too much to bear, they brought him back and tried to put him back together. It hadn’t worked. Jack Harkness was broken, and nothing on Earth could fix him. He begged them to help him return to the stars, and apparently even UNIT weren’t completely heartless. They contacted the first ship that requested passage through their airspace and arranged for Jack to travel with them. All he needed was his wrist-strap - currently in the possession of Gwen Cooper - to provide the teleportation device to get him onto their ship.
X~X~X~X
A biting wind knifed through him, and he drew his coat tighter around himself to guard against it. It seemed to hang wrong these days, too heavy on his shoulders and too loose around him, ready to whip away at any moment. It was no longer the protection and comfort it had once been.
Voices approached him up the hill, and he raised his chin with difficulty to face them. Gwen and Rhys crested the brow of the hill side by side, chuntering about the difficulties that Gwen faced getting up there. It stung, seeing them worrying about such tiny things when he’d lost everything, but he couldn’t tell them what had happened. Gwen would blame him or pity him, and he couldn’t cope with either.
He gained a sort of vindictive pleasure out of not telling her in the end. It was hard to understand what he’d seen in her when she stood there, demanding that he stay for her, thinking that she could be enough and that he owed her something. He’d indulged her too much, and she’d gone on being the spoilt only child she’d always been - in his grief, her self-centred demands suffocated him and blinded him to anything but his pain and her happiness.
Everything he had loved was gone. Alice would never speak to him again, he would never get a chance to get to know Steven, Ianto had done what Jack never could and chosen the world over Jack. In the face of his losses, especially the recent reopening of the void that Ianto had left in his heart, it was too hard not to hate Gwen for surviving with her family intact. Every movement ached, raising his head was a challenge, and he could only force himself to get up in the morning by not going to bed at all. If he stayed on Earth he would destroy himself. So when Gwen told him that he couldn’t run... He pressed the button on his wrist-strap and smiled grimly. “Oh yes I can. Just watch me.”
X~X~X~X
The teleport disoriented him, and he staggered against the wall whilst the world righted itself again. A high frequency vibration ran through the metal against his side, rattling his teeth and adding to the pounding of his headache. He shook his head and pushed himself up off the wall as footsteps approached, drawing himself up and turning to face them. “Captain Acisai?”
“Captain Harkness.” The leader of the group held a slender finely-boned hand out to him, and her brow ridges flushed pink with concern. “You are hurt?”
“No, it was just the teleport,” he assured her, shaking her hand and letting her assess him even as he reassessed his own initial judgement. “You must be Sergeant Fimer.”
“Yes. The Captain is on the bridge still. I bring you to him.” She stepped back and gestured to her guards. “You have weapons?”
His hand went automatically to his side, but he dropped it and shook his head. “No. I lost it,” he explained. “Will I need to have?”
“No. We will search your bag. Procedure,” she added with an unapologetic shrug. “Please give to Shipman Hikt.”
Jack handed his bag over and tucked his hands back into the pockets of his heavy coat, watching her overseeing the search of his bag. The search revealed very little - an airtight box filled with coffee that they sniffed cautiously, a couple of books and a few mementoes he couldn’t part with, and a variety of long-life foods in case he ended up in regions where the local cuisine would kill him. It might not stop him for long, but the darkness had grown more dark, cold and empty than ever before, and it was harder to force himself out of it.
The sergeant studied the pocket-watch, turning it over in one hand. “What this? Dangerous?”
“No! No,” he assured her, taking it back from her and running his thumb over the face. He hesitated, searching for the terms she would understand best. Her race, the Vaasthi, had many complicated levels of relationships, and it was hard enough to explain what Ianto had been to him in human terms. “It belonged to my living-lover,” he said eventually, settling for the word for a partner you lived with but were not in a formal relationship with. “He died.”
“I sorry.” She dropped her hand away from it and stepped back. “Your bag safe. We go to bridge when you ready.”
He nodded at her and repacked the bag as neatly as he could, then hauled it onto his shoulder and followed her down the hall, aware of her guards behind him. The corridors were tiled with large, pale-blue rubber-like tiles that absorbed the noise and vibration from the engines, unless you were leaning against them. It was a strange feeling underfoot, like walking where someone had spilled a sticky drink and not mopped it up. Transparent doors led into other corridors and into the engine rooms, where the volume increased, and then they passed a row of sealed, opaque doors with plaques that indicated the names, ranks and duty hours of their occupants. Sergeant Fimer paused by one of the doors and indicated it. “My cabin.”
He nodded, and she continued further down the corridor to a larger pair of clear doors. Through the doors he could see the bridge and the quiet bustle of well-organised activity. The bridge was a gently curved room with a panoramic vid screen. The working area was triangular, cutting off two of the corners of the room with two banks of the navigation, communication and support systems that were essential for a vessel of this size, and in the centre of the room was a wide chart-table, on which the captain and his navigator were checking their route.
The doors slid open with a cheerful tone, and the crew on the bridge looked up at them until a glare from Sergeant Fimer sent them back to looking busy. She bowed to the captain and led Jack up to him. “Captain Acisai, this Captain Harkness. Captain Harkness, Captain Acisai of the Atiftio Corporation.”
“Welcome aboard the Transporter Gulio,” Acisai greeted him in carefully-pronounced English. “You are a UNIT man, yes?”
“Torchwood,” he corrected in their language, noting the strength in the long, fine fingers when Acisai shook his hand. “Their allies.”
“Ah, Torchwood, yes. And you are Captain of Torchwood, yes?”
“I was.” He released the captain’s hand and hooked his thumb under the strap of his bag instead, stepping back to a respectful distance. “I want to thank you for agreeing to carry me. I am to join your crew?”
“Yes yes. You have engineering? We sort that later. You tired, and tonight you our guest.” He gestured to the sergeant, who returned a salute, and turned back to his chart. “Sergeant Fimer show you your quarters, show you mess. Tomorrow, if ready, you work, yes.”
Jack bowed, as he’d seen Sergeant Fimer do, and followed her back off the bridge onto the corridor. She led him back down to one of the offshoot corridors they’d passed and down it, stopping outside one of two doors off it. “This bunk room,” she explained, swiping a card in the lock and holding it out to him. Inside the room, which was a narrow corridor with a wall of pods leading off it, she showed him to one of the empty pods and demonstrated how to open the lockers iside it. “Your bunk. Stow your bag, and I show you mess.”
He stashed it in the locker and locked it again, unwilling to leave it out or to keep the sergeant waiting, and followed her back down the corridor. It was a simple layout and easy to follow. The mess was on the same side of the ship as his bunk room, but they had to return to the main corridor and continue away from the bridge for a while before they reached it. There was a small crowd gathered around one of the tables, playing a game with long, narrow sticks in different colours that Jack recognised from his travelling days, and they all saluted with an easy familarity at their entrance, turning curious gazes on Jack. He greeted them with a nod, aware of how different to them he was. “Captain Harkness,” Sergeant Fimer introduced him. “The UNIT man.”
They nodded and beckoned him over. “Captain, maybe you will be captain one day,” one of them suggested with a grin. “Captain Captain Harkness.”
Jack blinked and laughed. “Maybe,” he agreed. “One day.”
“We engineering team,” the leader explained. “Down time for shift, not yet time for sleep. So we play - you play?”
“I play,” he agreed. “But soon I have to sleep. Long day. Long year,” he corrected.
“Sleep,” a young woman in casual clothes scoffed. “Life not for sleep.”
He smiled at her and let them bring him into the game. They only had another quarter turn - about ten minutes in Earth time - before the shift had to go back to work and those who were off shift turned in for the rest of their rotation. Jack followed them back to the bunk room and got into his bunk silently, sealing it behind him and stretching out in the confined space to get as much rest as he could before his new life came knocking.
X~X~X~X
The Vaasthi’s food was safe, if unappetising, so he joined the crew in the mess the next morning to see what they’d set him to doing. They were all dull-eyed from sleep and quieter than they had been the night before, and quite content him to leave him to stare into his mug of chak. A short, slender member of the engineering team got up eventually, tapped him on th shoulder and beckoned him out of the room. The previous shift were acting as the mess crew, and they left their plates on the side by the door for them to clear up.
Jack’s guide took him down through the access ducts to the cargo hold below. Strong bullwarks separated the smaller compartments and protected the cargo from damaging the ship or being damaged. In one of the empty holds was a large piece of machinery that Jack recognised vaguely as being part of the cooling system, although he’d never worked closely enough with a ship of this size to know exactly what it was. “So,” he started, aware that his guide still hadn’t said a word. “What do you need me to do?”
The engineer gave him a withering look over the top of the machine, kneeling down beside it and pulling his kit over. “Just maintenence and cleaning. We rotate them, reduce wear, prolong use. Cheaper than working and working and working.” He bent his head to his task and grunted. “That for people.”
He nodded at the engineer’s back and rolled his shirt sleeves up, then came to join him next to the machine. Whilst his new colleague removed and checked the screws for wear, Jack accepted something like a pen with a tiny sponge on the end and cleaned traces of oil and grit from the holes the screws had been taken from. They worked smoothly, minds lost in the numbing but delicate task until the young woman he’d seen the night before came to join them with mugs of chak. She bent over them curiously and peered into the works. “Need new rotors,” she said, as if they hadn’t noticed. “We tell sergeant for next stop.”
Jack frowned up at her and sat back on his haunches. “Why not the captain?”
She shrugged. “Sergeant easier. You drink?”
He accepted the mug from her at last and nodded. “Thank you. Where will you get a replacement rotor?”
“Easy on Yooducca Station. All the parts from all the scrap. The scavenger ships come in... big losses in this part of space. Big losses. Only habitable planet is Sol 3, and little help from there.” She twitched her ears. “You know.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re pretty under-developed.” He swallowed a mouthful of Chak and grimaced. “But we have better tasting food.”
She laughed and patted his head. “Best chak in the universe. You have no taste. Come to mess later? We drink chak, play, tell stories. You have stories to tell us?”
“Lots.” He smiled and raised his mug to her. “Maybe I will.”
“Good. See you there.” She left them to it without a backwards glance and Jack finished off his mug of chak - which was warm even if it tasted foul - before he turned his attention back to the work.
“She distracted,” his colleague muttered. “Not good for delicate work.”
“Is that why she’s an errand runner?”
“Yes. Still young.” He reached inside to put a new screw in the hole Jack had just cleaned, dropping the other into a tin with a handful of others he’d deemed damaged. “Too young for ship.”
Jack grunted and started on the next hole. “Who is she related to?”
His colleague grinned down at his work. “Department commander. He intend her first captain. He want son.”
“Ah. Do you think she’ll do it?”
“No. If Sergeant Fimer not make captain, no woman make captain. And Sergeant Fimer no make captain.” He put the last screw back in that section and wiped his hands off. “You see.”
Jack accepted the rag to wipe his hands and frowned. “Why won’t she make captain?”
“She too good. First woman to captain should not better her former captains. But new captain should always better former captains.” His ears flattened against his skull. “She leave fleet soon. No advancement here. I follow her.”
“Yeah? Good for you.” He tilted his head and smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Engineer Poffi. And you are Engineer Captain now.”
Jack opened his mouth to correct him and... didn’t. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
X~X~X~X
Jack and Poffi were grimy by the time they got back to the mess, but still buzzing with energy from the Chak. The maintenence work was fiddly, but the only time they got to move around was when they’d swapped the piece they’d repaired for the back-up and put that back into storage. Everything else had been stationary, working on small sections of the engine. There was always a lot of nothing-to-do between stations, which allowed for longer down-time and careful maintenance.
Most of the crew were in the mess, eating large bowls of a simple stew with slabs of salty bread that Jack eschewed. The stew was bitter to his tastes, but there was something definitely wrong about the bread in his recollections.
They ate in silence, chewing their way through the bread and the tough meat. When most of them had nearly finished, the chef fame around with a tray of hot drinks and lumps of heavily-fruited cake. It was all distractingly blue, but it was sweet and refreshing after the bitterness of the stew.
The sergeant and the captain entered, and everyone got to their feet until they had their food and were sitting down at a separate table in the corner. Jack got to his feet with the rest of the crew, raising his eyebrows at Poffi in question. He twitched his ears in response, and they waited until the officers were engaged in eating before they leaned closer. “The captain demands respect,” Poffi explained. “He hope that that get it.”
“Ah.” Jack nodded and nibbled at his cake. Down the table people were starting to finish, and a tall, broad-shouldered woman stood up. She glanced over at the captain’s table and waited for him to gesture her on before she started tapping two spoons together against her hand to set the rhythm. Other people took it up, and when she was satisfied she began singing.
It was a rousing, carousing song about a period in a dock and the trouble that could befall a naiive young shipman there. Every culture had them, and they all ran along similar lines. The shipman drank too much, ran into the wrong sort of girl and woke up the next morning with all his shore-money and most of his clothes missing. The crew obviously knew it well, and with enough of them joining in their voices were less grating and more musical to Jack’s ears.
The chef brought a large bottle out from the kitchen and set it down in front of the singer. She took a deep swig and looked around the table, then passed it on to the young errand girl, who took a smaller swig and got to her feet, resting one foot on her chair and striking a pose before launching into a ghost story set on a darkened ship. The process went on, with each person choosing someone else to tell the next story, until someone close to him set the bottle down in front of Jack. “You tell,” he called across, his bridge crew uniform explaining why Jack didn’t recognise him. “You tell story of Sol.”
He started to protest, but a face came to his mind and he nodded. “Okay. I tell you a story, a true story.” There was a chorus of the good-natured jeers that greeted any claim that the story about to be told was a true story and he shook his head. “True story. I was there.
“There was a show, a travelling show. They came to the villages and they stole people away. For many years they took people, no one knew and no one believed.” He found himself settling into their speech patterns, the spacer’s dialect. “When the travelling shows stopped they went, took their stolen people with them. But nothing remembered gone for ever. The show was recorded and they returned, passing from legend to truth. Like ghosts. They touched a young man, but could not steal him away. They stole others. Old union-lovers, a young woman... a family, with two young children. The young man they couldn’t steal, he vowed to find them and return their victims. He searched, found them. Trapped them between light and dark. But their vitims were gone, all but one. The man they couldn’t steal, he found the youngest one, the child, and carried him home, out of the darkness.” He looked around at them, at their expectant faces. “He protected the child,” he continued, “guarded him, and hid him away in a safe place. The shadows couldn’t take him, and they could not take the child back.”
It wasn’t the best story he’d ever told, nor was it the smoothest, but he could already tell that it would be one they remembered. He passed the bottle on and sat down, feeling a sense of calm purpose stealing over him. Ianto Jones would not be forgotten.
Next chapter
